Sometimes, I meet people driving expensive cars and running big business who want to negotiate with me things. Making a site, things like that. And what strikes me is their willingness to negotiate. At first, I thought “hmm, they must have made those money by being good with power & negotiation, so this is an explanation”. But I think it’s more than this. Once you reach a level in your life, you get bored of things. You have pretty much everything in life, and nothing really excites you. And you enjoy the thrill of negotiation. You actually like & have pleasure in being better than the person in front of you. Most poor people would have two problems in negotiation: The lack of experience & practice. The feeling that they’re, somehow, inferior when they negotiate. The rich people don’t have any of these problems. They have lots of experience with negotiations (1) and they perfectly know they’re better than the person in front of them (2). The second point excites them, so they keep on doing this. So, the next time a guy driving an expensive car comes to you and tells you you should leave your prices them, try and have your excitement. Negotiate with them, smiling, knowing that you won’t care if you lose them, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing them annoyed by your lack of cooperation. Enjoy the game and don’t let them run over you. But, on the other hand, if you do need the name of that client on your portfolio, …

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Let’s say X does something wrong. What should you do? You have the option of complaining. You’ll help others avoid the same mistake you’ve made. You have the option of putting some rules. If X damages your property, you want to make sure the next time something will be different, from X knowing that the thing is a wrong thing to do, to not having a contact with X anymore. You have the option of ignoring this and moving forward. I’ll talk about this option here: If you ignore the thing X does to you, it will haunt you. You’ll think about that thing, and it will consume you. But, mostly, you will tend to focus on your mistakes in the relationship with X (not filtering things right at the beginning, ignoring some signs, not taking precautions). Thus, you’ll tend to solve things better next time. You’ll be better at handling business the next time. X can change. If X does something wrong to me, yes, I can tell everybody about my side of the story. But I am believer in human improvement. I don’t think that one who did a mistake will always repeat that mistake. That person may do so, but it also may not. It’s OK to give detailed feed-back to X, in order to improve. But, mostly, that feed-back needs to be asked for, not given without a request. You can and may give feed-back chaotically, but it’s not always a good idea. It is possible that if take action and …

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I played some backgammon these days with my father. He says the following: I should focus on winning. I should focus on learning the optimal route. I should avoid making mistakes. He seem to enjoy winning. I say the following: I should focus on learning. The best way to learn something is by making mistakes. I deliberately allow myself to make mistakes, even if this makes me lose some games. I really enjoy the excitement you get by being very close to winning and then to see him try so hard to beat me due to a mistake I make. We have some disputes based on this. :) In chess, I tend to have some fixed moves at the beginning, and then adapt to the situation. My father is very close to having an algorithm good-for-all at backgammon, which makes the game dull and boring. He just have to learn and remember his algorithm. A computer could do this very easily. Chess, and my style of backgammon, are not like that. You need flexibility. Sure, this implies some mistakes, but it’s more fun (I think).